Cardinality is the fourth blog post in a series about Counting Principles. These principles are helpful when developing children’s number sense. It’s not enough for them to learn to count by rote, they have to develop a strong foundation of numbers and counting.

You can see the other Counting Principle blog posts here.

What is Cardinality?

It is knowing that the last number that you said when counting is the number of objects in the set.

Why is Cardinality important?

Developing this number sense skill is important so that students can know how many objects are in a set and can compare two or more sets.

Activities

Counting sets of meaningful objects throughout the day will help students develop this skill. Model counting objects, then saying how many are in the set (“1,2,3 bananas. There are 3 bananas”).

Play dough mats, number puzzles, dominoes, are all great activities that will work on developing students’ cardinality skill. These blog post have some great counting ideas: number provocation, card center, math loose parts.

Cardinality Clip Cards

Laminate these clip cards and students can use clothespins to clip the correct number after counting the set (bonus- this works on fine motor skills too!)

If you would like to use these cards, they are a free download in my Resource Library (if you do not have he password, sign up for my newsletter and it will be sent to you):

Counting

If your students need more practice with their cardinality and number formations, these packs will have them practicing in so many different ways:

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